Anything as popular as MMA is right now will be watered down, castrated, and sold to the masses. Just wait until the pantload called "Street BJJ" or "Self Defense BJJ" hits the fan. I also predict the rise of douchebag MMA leagues, which will claim to train "alive." There's too much money and dishonesty in the world for it not to happen. Since TUF caught on I've become completely disinterested in MMA, the instant a preened white guy in a blue dress shirt mentioned it to me I was gone.

I'm more worried it will turn into WWE or something. There's alot of marketing and hype involved in MMA, just hope it doesn't turn into a fucking circus, because from the looks of the crowd MMA is attracting, things look a little bleak.

Bingo - MMA might go the opposite direction of karate - instead of becoming a bunch of self-righteous kata-prancers, it might end up as a staged freakshow, entertainment for the lowest common denominator - which is definitely not informed fight fans.

As for grappling, Judo is an example of a grappling art that has had a few problems - the number of illegal techniques, the increasing emphasis on throwing over real newaza in competitions, etc.

But I think grappling is more safe against the decline than striking overall. Hopefully BJJ and Judo will go the way of wrestling, boxing, and muay thai, and stay hard despite age. Viagra joke?

"[Fighting for Points] is doubtless very pretty, and invariably draws applause, but preferences should always be given to blows that do some business, to good straight hits that do something toward finishing the fight.
A man who has carefully trained for brilliant tapping play, will find himself considerably out of it in case he is called upon to do any real work."
-A.J. Newton, Boxing.

grappling itself, no. individual arts can and will. its started already with judo and bjj (look up zen judo, and the thread on here about bjj video courses for examples). also look at catch wrestling, it was once a viable system of submission wrestling, now most of it is crap,(matt furey anyone?).
I think eternalrage also has a great point in that we must look at professional 'wrestling' as a possible way the sport could go. Professional wrestling was a legitimate sport circa 1920 and before, I'm probably off by several years but at one point professional wrestlers were real competetors in a real sport. Today we have a overblown soap opera with fighting, while all attempts to re-establish pro wrestling as a real sport have failed miserably(RPW). Then again it may end up like boxing, which in many cases is little better with all the corruption, insane amounts of money, multiple orginizations having 'world champions', and the hairdos(don king).
competitions on an amatuer level do preserve the legitimacy of sports like grappling, on a professional level as pro 'wrestling' has shown us it does not neccessarily prevent the development of crap

I'm sure a few isolated cases exist of people teaching judo or BJJ in a wussy fashion, but the key word is isolated.

Take the disastrous martial arts on the other hand (and you know what I'm talking about) where teaching t3h suck is so much the norm that you could consider it a systematic problem with the art and it's organizations itself.

Judo, as old as it is, does not have this systematic problem and doubtfully ever will.

Yes and no. There are already shitty bulshido BJJ schools run by dudes who really aren't ready to be instructors, they are just a minority for now. I would highly doubt that this trend is going to do anything but snowball. However, there will certainly always be legitimate schools run by people who actually compete and everything. As long as a school competes you can know it's a good school cause even if they sucked initially, through getting destroyed over and over again, they learn what works

This all depends, actually. Is the ranking system of BJJ dependent upon competition? That's the one reason Judo hasn't gone Bullshido, is that to gain rank, you have to compete so much, and even win a certain amount. That's on top of knowing the information.